canon rumors FORUM

Jettatore

If this turns out 100% and releases, props to Canon for the extended support. It's a huge show of faith supporting older products, especially with an extravagant release like this, and should be a long running trend. My hats off, things like this will keep my arse firmly parked as a Canon fan.

While it's of topic, I think to take this logic a step further, Canon should simply open their firmware to those daring enough to mess with things under the hood. Even if they stipulate that it breaks warranty or some such, which is I'm sure specifically a big reason why they don't want to do this as that would be hard to track if a firmware hack broke something physically and then the original firmware was flashed back, it's still just the cooler thing to do and I think in general, a much bigger positive for all of photography on the whole compared to that minor downside of occasional bricked cameras.

Even if they stipulate that it breaks warranty or some such, which is I'm sure specifically a big reason why they don't want to do this as that would be hard to track if a firmware hack broke something physically and then the original firmware was flashed back

You can already break you camera with magic lantern if you want and then, if it's still somewhat working, reset the bootable flag so no one will notice you ever used ml.

It's like just in the smartphones - the manufacturer wants full control over the firmware because this means controlling the hardware. And the latter is needed to prevent feature-unlocked less expensive models to cannibalize more expensive ones. But in dslrs, it's rather irrational because you for example cannot upgrade your af system by software, only expand on it like magic lantern enabling focus patterns.

Imho they should just release a Canon firmware sdk, add a "void your warranty" trigger and be done with it, gaining lots of new customers. But being realistic, we can be happy Canon still doesn't seem to want to block magic lantern, though they don't support it or even acknowledge there is such a thing.

jmalmsten

Reading this article made me remember a list of suggestions I made on my blog when the first rumors came out... ( http://www.jmalmsten.com/2012/04/rumors-for-7d-firmware-update-i-have.html ) The sneak-reveal that they now did was a bit lackluster, but welcome. But I can't help but clap my hands and sarcastically say "good for you... it only took you, like what? 3 years to get the basics down? And then again only barely. You almost made a real effort there, and I applaud that."

To me it's still quite clear that the 7D was never really meant to be a video-shooter. It was more like a happy accident that started with the 5DII. Why do I say this? Well. Because Canon is clearly just flat out refusing to optimize their camera for video-shooters. Their camcorder-department gave us the C300 and it's 4K successor. And their luke-warm enthusiasm for the DSLR-video-shooters says that they really want us to jump ship as soon as possible towards their actual video-optimized cameras. And stop bothering them to get open their eyes about the obvious potential for a real video-firmware option geared for the motion-shooters.

I feel a bit like when we're ranting about George Lucas refusing to release a decent version of the original trilogy. The discussions on how and why and all that are all well and good, but it's fruitless and futile. George and Canon made their minds up years ago. And no amount of sound reasoning are going to change anything.

And their luke-warm enthusiasm for the DSLR-video-shooters says that they really want us to jump ship as soon as possible towards their actual video-optimized cameras.

Don't look the gift horse in the mouth - at least magic lantern will run even on the 5d3 (even if it'll be some time until then), Canon could just have chosen to disable 3rd party firmware booting from their current camera bodies...

I don't think they'll release it before the 5d3 firmware is fixed because Canon will have their people working on and testing the latter. And the 5d3 update was rumored to be available in May ... you go figure which May :-p

After this, I hope they'll at least update the 60d, 5d2 & 600d to work with the new radio flashes...

Overdue by what measure? A fixed 5d3 firmware might have some impact on 5d3 sales or even reviews (red af points, slow af point expansion, maybe even some more features to justify $3500), but delaying some more features for the 7d won't make much of a difference except for gps unit sales.